Meanwhile Bumpus happens upon Henry’s sonnets and confronts the poet with the charge of having written them. Henry, determined to save Aurora, “lies like a gentleman”—and incidentally overdoes it. Bumpus, mistaking his well-meant prevarication for impolite indifference to Aurora’s beauty, or denial of it, flies into a passion, and is on the point of soundly thrashing the amorous bard when Aurora stays his hand. Then Henry confesses, and Bumpus is so much pleased by the manner in which the sonnets celebrate his wife’s charms that he offers to print them for private circulation among connoisseurs with broad margins and de luxe binding.
The play is built upon the lines of broad farce, and in New York it made an uproarious success. The encounter between Bumpus and Henry is extraordinarily ludicrous. Aurora throughout is the typical enthusiast of the women’s clubs—filled with vague longings and ambitions, but intensely practical and commonplace at bottom. Henry, during one of their tumultuous exchanges, is about to break her fan. She shrieks the warning that it cost a dollar. He ventures upon a dark, melodramatic oath. “How dare you swear in my presence?” she demands. “One would think you were my husband!”
A pretty bit of fooling, à la “The Wild Duck,” “The Philanderer” and “Alice-Sit-by-the Fire.” Shaw calls it “a warning to theater-goers.” It is.
“YOU NEVER CAN TELL”
You Never Can Tell,” like many of the dramas of Shakespeare, was made to order. Shaw wrote it in 1896 and he calls it “an attempt to comply with many requests for a play in which the much paragraphed “brilliancy” of “Arms and the Man” should be tempered by some consideration for the requirements of managers, in search of fashionable comedies for West End theaters.” And so he laid the scene in England, and made all his characters English and kept as close to the earth as he could. But for all that, he failed to make a conventional parlor drama of it. Shaw is Shaw, and when he set out to build a comedy à la mode he evolved instead a tragedy covered with a sugar-coating of farce. On its face it is uproariously and irresistibly funny; beneath the surface there is as nasty an undercurrent as that of “Widowers’ Houses.”
Fergus Crampton, a wealthy English yacht builder, and his most marvellous family are the chief characters of the play. Years before the curtain rises Crampton and his wife agree to disagree and she packs off to Madeira with their three babies—two girls and a boy. Subscribing to the heterodox doctrine that a married woman is entitled to her own home, her own pocket-book and her own name, Mrs. Crampton assumes the cognomen of Clandon, bestows it upon her offspring and brings them up in complete ignorance of the existence of their paternal progenitor. Also she rears them in strict accordance with her ultra-advanced ideas of independence and individualism. In all matters concerning the emotions and intellect, they have freedom. And so they become unconscionable egotists, disrespectful to their elders, self-willed and obstinate, and nuisances in general.
As the curtain rises we find the Clandons back in England. Happening into a small seaside town, Phil and Dolly, the younger of the three children, scrape an acquaintance with one Valentine, a struggling young dentist (and also a being with advanced views of human events), and Dolly has the honor of paying him his first fee. Through him they meet his landlord, an irascible old gentleman in a semi-nautical coat and an habitual frown. They invite both dentist and landlord to luncheon, and at the meal the discovery is made that the latter is none other than the long-lost Mr. Crampton. Like the leading comedian of a burlesque show afterpiece, Crampton is in consternation and shrieks “My wife!” in a hoarse stage whisper.
“You are very greatly changed,” observes Mrs. Clandon-Crampton.
“I daresay,” replies the wretched husband and father. “A man does change in eighteen years.”